Entertainment
Once silenced by authorities, Iran’s Olivia Newton-John reveals her ‘sinful voice’ at 75
On the Shelf
Googoosh: A Sinful Voice
By Googoosh, Tara Dehlavi
Gallery Books: 336 pages, $30
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The first time Googoosh was asked to write a memoir, the request came from Iran’s Islamic Republic interrogators. Their goal was for the pop superstar to relay a “cautionary tale.” This, of course, did not sit right with the beloved diva who was the Olivia Newton-John of Iran’s music world until the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979 — and all female performers were banned from singing in public.
“I didn’t want to cooperate with them,” Googoosh tells me as she reflects on the sham memoir the agents tried to get her to write. “I hated to tell my story to them.” Decades after refusing to put her name on a government-sanctioned lie, Iran’s biggest pop star has finally broken her silence. Her new book, “Googoosh: A Sinful Voice,” was not a choice, she writes, but a “necessary duty.”
The lyrical story chronicles her life from birth to the present, including Googoosh’s four marriages and moments of joy and despair spent under decades of house arrest while Tehran was rocked by war. It’s shockingly candid, revealing multiple abortions, drug abuse (including her own) and chilling moments of suicidal ideation. “If people hate me when they read it, it’s OK. That was my life,” Googoosh says. She asserts she didn’t want to write something just to be pleasant. She also considers her home country tenderly, and in her book notes, “Iran is part of my being. You can take Googoosh out of Iran, but you can’t take Iran out of Googoosh.”
Googoosh’s book chronicles her life from birth to the present, including her four marriages and moments of joy and despair spent under decades of house arrest in Tehran.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Faegheh “Googoosh” Atashin was born in 1950 in Tehran to parents who were Azerbaijani Iranians. Googoosh wasn’t even potty-trained when she began performing as a toddler at cabarets as orchestrated by her showman father. She was mostly self-taught, imitating other famous singers. Soon she was in films and by the ’70s she was Iran’s most famous pop export, performing on international stages alongside Ray Charles and Tina Turner. Her infectious vocals, whether upbeat disco bops or heartwrenching ballads, became imprinted on the national consciousness. Ultimately her career was cut short. She writes: “The revolution swept across my homeland like a raging storm, unraveling the delicate fabric of a world once interwoven with tradition, modernity, and poetry. Almost overnight, the shimmering parties, the premieres of daring boundary-pushing films, and the intoxicating rhythm of music and freedom were replaced by fear, uncertainty, and darkness.”
On a recent fall afternoon, I met with Googoosh and her co-writer, Tara Dehlavi, on Zoom. Googoosh appears as chic as ever with her signature honey-gold hair slicked to the side and impeccable Covergirl-worthy shimmery makeup that makes the 75-year-old look decades younger. Googoosh mentions many famous writers over the years have reached out wanting to work with her on a memoir, but Dehlavi is not a known writer; she’s instead a soft-spoken 39-year-old former clinical psychologist whose exile from Iran has placed her in France most of her life.
“I said let’s write it in English,” Dehlavi tells me. She adds the reason she wanted Googoosh to write her memoir was that so much of it was untold, including how at age 50 she made a miraculous comeback. “I proposed, let’s please share your story with the world … and future generations. Because there have been many documentaries made about you but nothing from you yourself,” Dehlavi says.
(Brian Bowen Smith/Simon & Schuster)
Googoosh places full responsibility for the memoir’s existence on Dehlavi. “With Tara, I opened my heart,” she says. “I was free to talk about myself.”
Since settling in the West in 2000 — first Canada, then Los Angeles where she still resides — Googoosh has enjoyed multiple tours, including performances at the Hollywood Bowl, Madison Square Garden and the Sydney Opera House. Her fame is as solid as ever, thanks to a loyal diaspora full of fans old and new. Last spring, not only did she star in Ed Sheeran’s music video “Azizam” (she appears in the final seconds, where Sheeran is launched from the endless festivities of his Persiophile fever dream back into the recording studio. There, Googoosh tells him in Persian, ‘Azizam, let’s go write a hit song, hurry up!’), the song was released a week later with her vocals for a Persian version. Like everything she touches, it was a huge hit.
Googoosh admits her star has not yet dimmed, not even in her 70s. “For 21 years they closed the bottle, and all of a sudden, the bottle is opened and [out] I popped!” Googoosh says with her signature smile as one of her beloved Pomeranians pops up on her lap.
It turns out Dehlavi was the perfect person to have asked her to chronicle her life — and perhaps the only one who could have gotten that eventual yes. “Actually her mom is my very best friend from when she was 13 years old,” Googoosh says. “They are a part of my family.”
Dehlavi did not expect to be a key part of the team, a project that would essentially encompass the whole of her 30s, but it’s clear this would not have gotten done without her. “There were times where I jokingly felt I was worse than the interrogators in Evin [Prison],” she says. “But I just wanted to be the project manager on this. … I just got scared if we found a ghostwriter, her voice would get lost in translation and so I got more and more protective of that voice. I was just like a bodyguard — I can’t just let anyone take Googoosh’s voice as the narrator.”
As a protector of Googoosh’s story, she recalls double-checking if the star really wanted to share some more revealing anecdotes. “She was like, ‘We’re either going to write this memoir or we’re not,’” Dehlavi says. “Just like in her art, where she goes all in, and feels the lyrics, the words, the music, it was the same with this book. She was like — I either speak or I stay quiet and I don’t write this.”
In their decade of drafting, Dehlavi and Googoosh wrote two other versions of the book until they got to this one — the version that finally felt right.
Googoosh admits her star has not yet dimmed, not even in her 70s.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
The result is a memoir that is poignant without being distractingly ornate. Chronological chapters are interspersed with glimpses into Googoosh’s horrific time incarcerated in an Islamic Revolutionary Court makeshift prison, where she was among detainees who at times looked to her legacy, and songs, for light amongst the turmoil. The book operates in a similar way as we journey to what we know is a happy ending — Googoosh getting her voice back to not just sing again but to tell us this long-awaited story.
“I was thinking my story was not important for people, especially for foreigners,” Googoosh shares with me. “But I was wrong.”
One of the most moving parts of the book is how it ends, with the specter of a protest slogan linked with Iranian women’s rights activism, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” alluded to, adding to the noble grandeur and potent ambition you somehow sense throughout the project. Dehlavi agrees. “I think both Googoosh and I through her story and through her memories knew that inevitably it would shine light on the struggle of women in Iran,” she says.
In the final pages, Googoosh notes that women in Iran are currently not allowed to record music or sing solo in front of a male audience. She writes with the same aching longing you hear in her ballads, the acknowledgement of pain, but the steadfast belief in something bigger and better — in this case, her “hope that my story can break down the silence that surrounds my people’s plight, especially our women. I pray that very soon, they, too, will have reclaimed their voices.”
Khakpour was born in Iran and raised in Greater Los Angeles. She is the author of five books, including most recently, “Tehrangeles.”
Movie Reviews
‘The Saviors’ Review: Adam Scott and Danielle Deadwyler in a Timely Comic Thriller With Good Intentions and Clunky Execution
If there is one thing Sean (Adam Scott) would like to make perfectly clear, it’s that he’s only ever had the best intentions. He’s no bigot. He doesn’t buy into far-right propaganda like his parents (Ron Perlman and Colleen Camp) do. And he’s been nothing but hospitable to his new Airbnb guests, Jahan (Nazanin Boniadi) and Amir (Theo Rossi). If it happens that he finds them suspicious, it’s certainly not because they’re Middle Eastern. It’s only because there’s just something off about them, somehow.
As Sean eventually learns the hard way, though, good intentions can only ever count for so much. His movie, too, is proof of that. The premise of The Saviors, a genre-defying thriller written (with Travis Betz) and directed by Kevin Hamedani, is undeniably timely, exploring the way faulty assumptions about some unknown Other might have disastrous, even apocalyptic consequences. But an emphasis on broad ideas over nuanced detail yields a film that’s more interesting in theory than in practice.
The Saviors
The Bottom Line A worthwhile message, flatly conveyed.
Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Narrative Spotlight)
Cast: Adam Scott, Danielle Deadwyler, Theo Rossi, Kate Berlant, Nazanin Boniadi, Greg Kinnear
Director: Kevin Hamedani
Screenwriters: Kevin Hamedani, Travis Betz
1 hour 30 minutes
Sean’s increasing fear of the Razi siblings isn’t the only problem he’s got going on. The only reason the place is being rented to begin with is because he and Kim (Danielle Deadwyler) are preparing to divorce and the mortgage needs paying off. No surprise, then, that Kim is initially skeptical of Sean’s conspiracy theories, assuming her aimless husband to be fixating on trivial nonsense. But as Kim also starts noticing odd things — including a missing journal and an alarming map, to add to the strange electrical equipment and unexplained lights Sean’s been trying to tell her about already — she slowly comes around.
The Saviors pitches its tone somewhere between horror, thriller and comedy, and there are elements of all of those in the slightly unnerving sense that Kim and Sean almost seem to need Amir and Jahan to be up to no good. The excitement of nosing around the siblings’ stuff, comparing notes afterward, hiring a private investigator (Greg Kinnear as Jimmy Clemente, who looks and acts exactly as you’d want a Greg Kinnear character named Jimmy Clemente to look and act) and planning to take their findings to the FBI rejuvenates their relationship like nothing else has. During a bout of make-up sex, Kim even asks for a change of position so they can both keep staking out the backyard while they screw.
But like much else in The Saviors, that almost psychosexual component is an intriguing idea that, once presented, just sits there. It’s not carried to some surprising logical extreme, nor deepened into rich character work. You can see what the film is trying to say about a political climate in which the best unifier is a common enemy, but it’s not expressed with enough finesse or confidence to hit a nerve.
The Saviors does not even tell us much about Sean and Kim, since despite Scott and Deadwyler’s affable chemistry — too affable, maybe, considering they’re about to split — the characters are so vaguely drawn that it’s never clear what brought this couple together in the first place, or what’s pulling them apart now. The real, meta reason for their coupling seems to be that the filmmakers wanted a Black woman to ever so slightly complicate the racial dynamics, calling Sean out for “living in a white bubble” when he fails to comprehend why these visitors might seem skittish in their lily-white town.
That she eventually starts to buy Sean’s thinking is rooted in another shrewd and salient observation, about the contagion of prejudice. The rank bigotry of a neo-Nazi newsletter filters through folks like Sean’s parents and sister (a very funny Kate Berlant) — which is to say conservatives, but mostly amiable ones. That, in turn gets spread to nice white liberals like Sean, then even more left-leaning skeptics like Kim. But once again, The Saviors undermines its own relevance by handling its characters like props being used to make a point, rather than people with their own complex motivations or contradictions.
This extends as well to Amir and Jahan, despite an impressive performance by Rossi that manages to convey the depth of Amir’s emotions long before we understand what’s behind them. The siblings are cryptic and unknowable by design, and Jahan even more so for her silence. (She’s deaf, Amir explains early on, but can lip-read.) The script does a decent job of keeping us guessing as to their true goals, playing on the tension between our desire to see them proven innocent and our gnawing realization that they’re clearly up to something strange.
Once the truth is out, however, and it becomes possible to piece together how the past several days have looked from their perspective, The Saviors just stops. It’s made its point — loudly and bluntly, including in a line of dialogue that might as well have been presented with a flashing neon caption reading “This is the theme of the movie” — and has nothing more to add. In fairness, it’s a message that’s always worth remembering, and one that sadly feels more essential than ever. If only it had been delivered in a package sturdy enough to really sell it.
Michael B. Jordan was all about sharing the love Sunday night, giving unsuspecting fans a thrill when he swung by an In-N-Out Burger with his lead actor Oscar after the Academy Awards.
And we’re not talking the In-N-Out typically served to the beautiful people at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Nope. Jordan showed up at an actual In-N-Out location, much to the delight of the burger lovers and paparazzi who swarmed the restaurant with him.
A first-time nomination was the charm for Jordan, who began his career around the turn of the millennium. The newbie nominee won the trophy out of the gate for his portrayal of twins Smoke and Stack in Ryan Coogler’s juke joint-and-vampires movie “Sinners.”
Michael B. Jordan hit up the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party after his In-N-Out stop.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
In viral videos of the visit, Jordan could be seen posing for the crowd, autographing an In-N-Out hat for one of the employees and sitting down at a table to dive into what appeared to be a double-double with cheese, with a pile of fries on the side. Fans stood on tables and booths, TMZ reported, to get a glimpse of the newly minted winner. There was a ton of cheering, then Jordan reportedly made a quick exit after a few bites.
The burger stop appeared to come after Jordan got his Oscar engraved at the Governors Ball, where he may have taken a pass on the chicken nuggets with caviar and smoked salmon with caviar on Oscar-shaped crackers. The double-double had no caviar, which was probably a good thing.
The actor did change from the formal black ensemble he wore to the show and to the restaurant into a brown double-breasted suit with a white shirt and black tie for the Vanity Fair party.
He was likely hungry after the ceremony, where folks in the audience had to make do during the show with a “Moderately Happy Meal™” from host Conan O’Brien. The snacks, which are traditionally left under the seats every year, included a box of candy — we heard Junior Mints and Raisinets — a small bag of Skinny Pop popcorn and water in a metal bottle.
Jordan had good company among the lead actor Oscar nominees, who also included Timothée Chalamet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ethan Hawke and Wagner Moura. His win came after a recent lead actor upset at the Actor Awards, formerly known as the SAG Awards.
Coogler’s win for original screenplay was a first also, though his three nominations this time around came after a 2021 best picture nod for “Judas and the Black Messiah” and one in 2023 for original song — the writer-director co-wrote “Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”
“Sinners,” the Oscars’ most nominated film ever, came away with four wins out of the 16 categories it was up for: In addition to Coogler and Jordan’s wins, Autumn Durald Arkapaw took home the trophy for cinematography (the first woman to win in that category) and Ludwig Göransson did the same for the score.
Paul Thomas Anderson holds his Oscars for best adapted screenplay, best director and best picture for One Battle After Another.
Mike Coppola/Getty Images
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Mike Coppola/Getty Images
As Sunday’s Oscars ceremony approached, it seemed to be shaping up to be a showdown between the vampires and the revolutionaries, between Sinners and One Battle After Another. In the end, One Battle After Another won both best picture and best director, but it was a very good night for Sinners, too, including an original screenplay award for writer and director Ryan Coogler.
There were some surprises over the course of the evening, including a rare tie in the live action short category, a remembrance of Robert Redford that included Barbra Streisand singing a bit of “The Way We Were,” and Jimmy Kimmel stepping in just long enough to make some pointed comments about media censorship. But let’s go over some of the major takeaways.
A celebrated director gets his Oscar.
Paul Thomas Anderson won best director for One Battle After Another after three previous nominations for There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza. Anderson had already won several major Oscar precursor awards this year, including top directing prizes at the BAFTAs and from the Directors Guild of America, so he was the odds-on favorite. The other nominees in the category were relative newcomers: Ryan Coogler, Josh Safdie and Joachim Trier were all first-time directing nominees; Chloé Zhao was nominated (and won) for Nomadland at the ceremony in 2021.
Michael B. Jordan won a rare acting award for a genre movie.
Michael B. Jordan won best actor for his portrayal of twin brothers in Sinners.
Brianna Bryson/Getty Images
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Brianna Bryson/Getty Images
Sinners is a drama, but it’s also very much a genre film. It’s horror. It’s vampires. Those are not the kinds of films that most often win Oscars for actors. But Jordan, with his first nomination, won over performers from much more traditionally awards-friendly films. Three of those actors (Leonardo DiCaprio, Timothée Chalamet and Ethan Hawke) already had multiple acting nominations before this year.
The last actor to win for a genre film might have been Joaquin Phoenix for Joker, since that was technically a comic-book movie, but that one did away with most of its genre trappings and pressed itself into a dramatic mold, which Sinners emphatically does not. Before that, while definitions of genre aren’t bright lines, you might have to go all the way back to … Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, if you consider that horror? Maybe even further? At any rate, it’s a great win for an actor who has been beloved at least since The Wire almost 25 years ago, who’s been doing rich and varied work ever since. His victory is also a win for his lengthy and fruitful collaboration with Ryan Coogler in Sinners, but also in Fruitvale Station, Creed and Black Panther.
Amy Madigan, the award-winning straight-up monster.
Amy Madigan won best supporting actress for her performance in Weapons.
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Arturo Holmes/Getty Images
(We don’t mean Amy Madigan the person, of course.) Madigan won best supporting actress for her deeply unsettling and entirely singular performance as Aunt Gladys in Weapons, which is even more fully a horror movie than Sinners. While the nominated cast members from Sinners — Jordan, Delroy Lindo and Wunmi Mosaku — play regular people who are swept into an unreal situation, Madigan is playing, essentially, the boogeyman (boogeywoman?). It’s thrilling to see the Academy recognize a performance that is as weird and funny and scary as just the last few minutes of what Madigan does in Zach Cregger’s terrifying story of a town that sees a whole classroom full of its children disappear.
The casting Oscar makes its debut.
Cassandra Kulukundis won the Academy’s first award for achievement in casting for her work on One Battle After Another.
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Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
This was the first year that there was an Oscar for casting, which is very much overdue — there have been casting Emmys for ages. It was easy to argue for any of the nominated casting directors. Marty Supreme and The Secret Agent both deploy nontraditional actors in some roles, Sinners and One Battle both use a wide variety of well-known and well-regarded stars in interesting ways, and Hamnet places most of the weight of an enormously heavy story on the shoulders of just a couple of performers, including best actress winner Jessie Buckley.
Cassandra Kulukundis, who won for One Battle After Another, not only has been working with Paul Thomas Anderson for ages, but she also worked on casting (get this) for both The Brutalist and Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. But all the nominees have tremendous resumes. Francine Maisler, who was nominated for Sinners, was the credited casting director for Arrival, Creed, Baby Driver, Widows, and Challengers! Honestly, the biggest problem in the category was that everybody couldn’t win.
A first in the cinematography category.
Autumn Durald Arkapaw accepts the award for best cinematography for Sinners.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
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Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
Autumn Durald Arkapaw, who won best cinematography for her work on Sinners, was only the fourth woman, and the first woman of color, to be nominated in the category. She becomes the first woman to win. Sinners is a sumptuously, inventively, beautifully shot film, and the cinematography is one of the core crafts that makes it so effective.
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